String Theories, Feb 2025

Escaping To The Quantum Realm; Reviving Sun Records; Sam Grisman; Kaitlin Butts; New Instrumental Albums; Mickey Raphael; Keyboard journeyman Red Young

Feb 17, 2025

**A supernova in Cassiopeia, imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope. This is what calms me down these days.**

Hello Friends. When Trump won the White House in 2016, I was so bothered and anxious that I decided to put my mind on something big and different. I dove into reading Moby Dick for the first time, and it was a magnificent, transporting experience. On a daily basis, I’d step through a portal to a 19th century whaling ship with all these cross cutting dramas and power struggles, and the sad situation in the country that faded for a while. That the novel was about being trapped on a storm-tossed vessel with a mad leader with a Christ complex felt on point, helping me process the darkness of the 21st century with some long-view perspective.

This time around, fiction has been there for me again, but lighter-weight stuff (so far). You know that movie Conclave about the drama surrounding the selection of a new pope? I didn’t see it, but I liked the sound of the story so I read the novel by Robert Harris, and I dug it. Again, a book let me take a trip to a setting and place and power dynamic I know nothing about and that really doesn’t affect me in the least. Yet as January moved on to the fateful 20th and the launch of the misbegotten disaster of DT 2.0, I needed that mental safe space that Moby Dick gave me. And I’ve found it by going hard at a subject I’d already dabbled with and find utterly fascinating - um - nuclear physics and quantum mechanics. I’m even finding a new passion for the math, because it’s always intimidated me. (Please don’t unsubscribe. There’s a point.)

I finally saw the film Oppenheimer during the winter break, and that made me remember how I’d been gripped back in the 90s by a book it was based on, The Making Of The Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. I got interested again in how a small group of scientists before 1945 figured out the parts of the atom and the bizarre ways they behave - with no prayer of directly observing them and only the most meager equipment - no electronics, no computers, no lasers. The human ingenuity and devotion to rigor and truth is madly inspiring to me because it contrasts so sharply with the new regime. So I went back to the Rhodes book, and I found a new one that’s wildly edu-taining called The Amazing Story Of Quantum Mechanics by James Kakalios. You want something to be distracted and inspired by? I recommend this history so you can be surrounded by ultra smart people and absorb some of their insights and how they helped build the world we live in now. Our smartphones literally operate on quantum processes.

What does E=mc2 really mean? I now have a feeling for it and and basically how it predicts the force unleashed by a few pounds of metal in a nuclear bomb. I am dazzled by photons and their journeys carrying light across intergalactic space, which seem to us to take millions of years (relativity!). I now could explain why gamma rays are very, very bad for us and how the Earth makes an electromagnetic shield against them that keeps the sun from blowing our atmosphere into space, like it did with Mars. I read this stuff and watch explainer videos with a spiritual mindset honestly. I find myself appreciating our fragile existence with a ferocity and gratitude that I could never marshal through traditional religion. If what we are made of and how nuclear physics binds us to supernovae like the one in my photo isn’t the language of God, I don’t know what could be closer.

I know we’re disoriented and anxious. And while there are times for speaking out, educating ourselves, calling our representatives and taking to the streets, I’m suggesting we find and cultivate aspects of our world - exterior and interior - that this crackpot vandal administration can’t reach. They can’t change the laws of physics. They can’t erase our books. And while I grieve over the damage they seem determined to do to our cultural institutions like the Kennedy Center, they can’t touch our music. For me, it’s family, friends, science, literature, and music that are going to be my buffer and my solace for however long this kakistocracy lasts.

I admit that I feel impotent on the political front as a citizen and an occasional commentator. I’ve drowned my grief about all this - the catastrophic advent of DOGE and a bunch of twisted and spiteful cabinet appointments - with the other subjects I mentioned and, to be frank, a certain amount of semi-indefensible indifference. America? My overwhelming reaction right now is to throw up my hands. I see a society in free fall, willfully ignorant, gleefully illiterate, digitally degenerate and casually nihilistic. I feel as estranged from my country in 2025 as I do from America of 1855. That country was cruel, ungovernable, racist and corrupt. I know little about it. Its sins aren't my fault. I understand its people and their motivations about as well, or little, as I understand Lindsay Graham betraying his dear friend John McCain by bending the knee or Marco Rubio dashing off to serve Putin’s interests over Ukraine. These people are unknowable to me - credentialed adults who’ve sacrificed their influence, their responsibilities, and their oath to the Constitution to a man they know to be depraved and delusional. Not with a bang but a whimper as somebody said.

Oh well. Thanks for letting me vent and share my personal survival strategies, which I freely admit are (for now) self-centered. I don’t yet know how to respond or proceed as a citizen except to be clear that I’m against all of this (except for scrapping the penny - yay - fine) and I tried to raise the alarm with everyone I know. I know nearly all of my friends did too. We have many compatriots, and we’ll rise up when there’s an opening, but we are in the shadows now, dissidents in our own country. Globally, we’re in good company. Thanks for your friendship and kinship.

So! With that non-cheery but sadly unavoidable invocation, I offer some positivity in the form of music news and interviews posted recently on our beloved WMOT. My job continues to sustain me as well. And in the meantime, I’m working harder than ever to get my book edited and ready for publication this fall. More on that soon.